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The Space Invader

“I am terrible at video games,” Tomohiro Nishikado says. His admission sounds hardly unusual for a man of sixty-nine, but it’s a secret that he has kept for thirty-five years, ever since he created the classic arcade game Space Invaders, in 1978. “In fact,” he added, “I struggle to make it past Space Invaders’ first level.”

This is not merely a symptom of age. Nishikado says that he has always been terrible at video games. “I balanced the game’s difficulty entirely by responding to feedback from the people working around me,” he admitted. “Had it been left up to me, Space Invaders would have been a far easier game.”

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While the American-made Pong, released in 1972, heralded the emergence of video games as a new form of entertainment, it was the Japanese who, six years later, visually defined the first decade of commercial games. Space Invaders’ iconic pixilated alien combatants were designed with such economy and effectiveness that they remain prominent in pop culture’s collective consciousness, decades after amusement arcades began their decline.

In the game, you must defend yourself against a phalanx of phosphorous white alien blobs—eleven wide and five deep—that march in threatening, uniform rows down the screen. The only tool in your arsenal is a pixel peashooter. Chunky “bases” protect your ship from alien attacks, offering rudimentary cover until they are chipped away by enemy fire, leaving you exposed and vulnerable. Clearing the screen of attackers only replenishes their ranks with nimbler, more aggressive replacements. In every arcade game, you pay to postpone inevitable defeat, but in Space Invaders a talented defender can play on a single credit until reaching the game’s “kill screen,” the point at which a coding error prevents further play.

Space Invaders sold an unprecedented hundred thousand machines in Japan; Bally Midway, the game’s U.S. distributor, sold around sixty thousand units in 1979 alone. Today, with its jagged shapes and sine-wave squeals, the game is an icon of the industry’s formative days and the medium’s ongoing appeal: a simplistic rendering of fears that can be overcome with determination and a steady focus.

But Space Invaders didn’t always generate favorable press. In Japan, soon after the game’s release, a twelve-year-old boy held up a bank with a shotgun. He didn’t want notes, he told the clerk, just coins. Under interrogation, he admitted that he wanted the money to play Space Invaders. In England, in November, 1981, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy prostituted himself in a parking lot for two pounds. This was enough, he later quantified, for ten games of Space Invaders. Police in the South of England dubiously claimed that the Space Invaders obsession had “doubled housebreaking figures,” while the Labour M.P. George Foulkes, fearing for the “glazed eyes” of youngsters, lobbied to subject the game to local authority regulation in Parliament. The novelist Martin Amis wrote, in his 1982 ode “Invasion of the Space Invaders,” of a young actress he knew with injuries sustained in the arcade so severe that her index finger “looked like a piece of liver.”

Nishikado grew up near the neon glow of Osaka, but he describes his immediate childhood environment as “slow-paced.” He spent his free time playing Shogi, a Japanese variation of chess, fishing, and conducting explosive science experiments. “Often, I’d invite my friends over to my house to show off new experiments,” he said. “On more than one occasion, I caused a chlorine gas leak, and the neighbors complained.” Nishikado eventually became interested in electronics. While he was still a junior-high-school student, built a number of radios, and as a high-school student he made vacuum-tube amps to listen to records.

Nishikado studied electronics at Tokyo Denki University, specializing in designing circuitry for televisions. After a failed stint at an audio company, Nishikado reconnected with a school friend who worked at Taito Trading Company, a Japanese vending-machine manufacturer founded in 1953 by Michael Kogan that had recently begun importing and selling jukeboxes, pinball machines, and other electro-mechanical arcade games. Nishikado joined Taito in 1969, despite having “no particular plans to become a game designer.”

Over the next several years, Nishikado had become a relatively experienced designer of games. He had built numerous titles inspired by Atari classics, like Soccer, essentially a sports-themed rendering of Pong, which he considers Japan’s first home-grown game. One of his games, Western Gun, was licensed to a company in the U.S. and redesigned by Dave Nutting Associates to use microprocessors; prior to this development, games were generally built on discrete logic, where diodes or transistors acted as electronic switches. When Nishikado saw how the Americans had rebuilt his game, re-titled Gun Fight, he decided to work on a project using the same technology.

At the time, Nishikado was hooked on Breakout, an Atari game notable for the involvement of Apple Inc. founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. (Jobs famously diddled Wozniak out of a considerable amount of money on the project). “I was determined to come up with something that was even better than Breakout,” said Nishikado. “My take was that the appeal was due to the sense of accomplishment and exhilaration involved in destroying a set number of targets and then moving on to a new level. I felt I could improve upon this by giving the targets a more interesting shape and turning it into a shooting game.”

In Nishikado’s first version of the game, the player shot down airplanes. But the vehicle movements appeared jittery, leading the designer to settle on human opponents. Taito’s president balked when he saw the idea, and banned the use of human targets. A new idea came to Nishikado: “In Japan, we were starting to hear about the popularity of ‘Star Wars,’ ” he said. “I decided to make the targets aliens, as a way to capitalize on the budding space boom.” Drawing inspiration from the buglike aliens in H. G. Wells’s novel “The War of the Worlds,” a book Nishikado loved as a child, he began to draw Martian enemies using simple pixel patterns.

The design process lasted for over a year. “This was the first Japanese game developed using microprocessors,” he said. “I spent most of my time familiarizing myself with the technology and building game-development tools. I was too preoccupied to concern myself with the game’s future.”

While the resulting game proved popular with his colleagues, Nishikado’s superiors were grimly concerned with its future. “When I showed a work-in-progress to the upper-level sales management, they weren’t impressed,” he said. “They couldn’t keep up with its pace.” The negativity surrounding the game at Taito’s offices only grew when Space Invaders was shown to a sampling of arcade operators before its launch. “The feedback was almost entirely negative,” he said. “Very few orders were placed.”

But the arcades that agreed to test it saw unprecedented success in the subsequent months. “Young players found the game quite thrilling,” he said. “Word spread.” Eventually, pachinko parlors and bowling alleys rebranded themselves as Space Invaders arcades, and the novelty pop group Funny Stuff released a hit single, “Disco Space Invaders.” Rumors spread of a national shortage of hundred-yen coins owing to its popularity. “To be honest, I don’t know for sure if that’s a fact,” Nishikado said. (It isn’t.) “But I did regularly see trucks sagging from the weight of all the coin-filled bags.”

After the game’s release, Nishikado was contractually prevented by Taito from revealing that he was the game’s designer. But he would occasionally visit Tokyo arcades to quietly watch people play. “It was a shock to see all those people sitting in front of my game,” he said. “All I could think about was about how terrible it would be if a critical bug appeared.”

Under the cover of enforced anonymity, Nishikado’s life did not change much in those years, even with accolades coming in from the likes of Steven Spielberg, who wrote, in his introduction to Amis’s book, “The aliens have landed and the world can never be the same again … there’s really nowhere left to go to avoid them.” In fact, the game’s success took Nishikado away from his newfound love of game design. “I was promoted to Section Chief at Taito,” he said. “After that point, I spent most of my time managing other employees. Unfortunately, that meant that I was no longer able to spend my time directly involved with game design. I regretted the promotion.”

The game’s success also caused Taito to fall behind in the technological arms race of the time, because it was stuck supporting its massive platform. “I wanted to design a new-generation game board,” Nishikado said. “But we were flooded with requests to build new games compatible with the current Space Invaders hardware. That gave our competitors the chance to catch up, engineering-wise.” These dual, unforeseen setbacks led Nishikado to view the game with some frustration. “At the time, I wasn’t very attached to Space Invaders,” he said. “I had fonder memories of my previous games,” like Western Gun.

Elsewhere, Space Invaders was influencing a generation of game designers. Imitators and mutant variations on the theme filled amusement arcades as game developers gave players ever more elaborate ways to defend Earth. While the game’s commercial success was vast, its legacy was more enduring: it laid down the systems, rules, and vocabulary that blockbusters like Halo and Grand Theft Auto use today.

Now, Nishikado’s once cool view on his most famous creation has warmed. “Over the years, I’ve seen how Space Invaders helped grow the video-game industry and inspire younger designers,” he said. “I’m proud of its huge impact. Even if I still can’t clear the first stage.”

Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Correction: Pong was released in 1972.

Simon Parkin is a contributing writer for newyorker.com and the author of “Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline.”